Originally Posted by
sharktooth
These new M1 Macs are some neat hardware, but Apple has become THE giant ewaste producer of the new millennium. This is due to their blatant and cynical approach to built in operating system obsolescence. You'll get about 5 to 7 years with some level of operating system support with security updates, but after that you'll have a system that's a security risk. This is fine for people who are using their computer for a living, and can justify the expense to upgrade hardware every two or three years, but for the average Joe, these are an awful choice.
Here's how the built in operating system obsolescence scam works. Apple has yearly updates to the operating system, with a new operating system name each year. After 3 years each operating system becomes obsolete, and is no longer supported for any security updates. You can keep updating to newer operating systems to stay up to date, but unfortunately Apple stops allowing any operating system updates to computers that are more than about 5 to 7 years old. So essentially, after about 5 to 7 years you're completely stuck, with no possible way to update the operating system in order to get security updates. This is a complete disgrace, especially since the Mac operating system is completely proprietary to Mac computers. They can't even support their own hardware. The real joke here is that you can run some older Macs on Windows 10 using Bootcamp, and can get all the latest updates and software from Microsoft to run Windows 10 applications on your Mac.
Lack of security updates can cause some major problems. In a professional environment, many places will not allow computers to be attached to their network if the security system is not up to date. For the home user, it means that newer applications may not run on your Mac since the software developer doesn't want to work around the security issues with older Macs. This is highlighted with web browsers, since the latest version of almost every web browser will not run on a Mac operating system that is more than about 6 years old. As an example, Firefox currently needs at least Mac OS Sierra to run the latest version. Sierra came out in 2016, so it's only 5 to 6 years old.
As a long time Mac user, I now see Macs as being a long term liability for the average user, from the perspective of cost and obsolescence. Unless you have to live on the bleeding edge, because your income relies on it, I think you'd be far better served by a competent new or used Windows machine. The only reason Apple gets away with this obsolescence scam is because people keep buying this crap without holding Apple accountable.
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